PROFESSOR PAWLOW’S DEMONSTRATIONS OF PSYCHIC INFLUENCE IN DIGESTION
[In presenting a theory of human alimentation involving mental or nervous as well as mechanical and chemical factors which influence it for good, it is not often that an author is able to enlist the assistance of a complete battery of scientific confirmation to fortify his own crude observations taken direct from personal experience in the study of natural requirements.
Professor Pawlow, with his marvellously skilful investigation of the workings of the digestive secretions, and Dr. Cannon of the Harvard Medical School, by aid of persistent and patient X-ray studies, explain how it is that earned appetite and thorough mouth-treatment of food are preliminary necessities of easy digestion, and that disturbance or shock of any sort during the process stop digestive proceedings and endanger health. They show also that when the mouth is used to do all that it can do in the work of digestion all the rest is easily accomplished by the Natural Automatic Processes within the body.
They both show that we have, each of us, a certain responsibility in the matter of right digestion and healthy nutrition, and that all this personal responsibility is located in the head, in the mind, and in the mouth, and that while the alimentation is proceeding it is a sacred duty to do our part right, according to the intelligence that these most valuable demonstrations teach.
Professor Pawlow has allowed publication of his lectures in Russian and German, and recently Professor W. H. Thompson of the Physiological Department of Trinity College, Dublin, has made an English translation which is issued by Charles Griffin & Company of London and J. B. Lippincott of Philadelphia.
The author has to express special gratitude to Professor Pawlow, Professor Thompson, Messrs Griffin and Lippincott for permission to reprint herein some entire lectures and extracts that bear especially on the practical understanding of our subject.
Professor Pawlow is one of the Board of Scientific Assessors mentioned in the REPORT of a PLAN for an International Inquiry into the subject of Human Nutrition.
In one of the lectures, not here reprinted, Professor Pawlow gives merited recognition of the early statements of the French physiologist Blondlot relative to psychic influence on the digestive secretions made some half century ago, but discredited by physiologists since that time, owing to insufficiency of evidence brought forward in support of the statements.
Professor Pawlow’s acknowledgment is so gracefully rendered that it is here given as a model of scientific courtesy.
“I have depicted the work of the gastric glands as we have seen it in our experiments, and as it has developed under our hands. Is the picture a new one? In its details, yes; but not in its fundamental features. However singular it may appear, the sketch of this picture was more than fifty years ago outlined by physiology. May this constitute another reason for our science relinquishing its characteristic shyness of new things and for its conversion to our interpretation of the phenomena under consideration!
“The talented author of the Traité Analytique de la Digestion—Blondlot—spoke in plain words of the importance of taking food, and of the specific excitability of the gastric mucous membrane. The facts adduced in the working up of his theory were naturally insufficient, but we must not forget that the first experiments on dogs with artificial gastric fistulæ had only just been performed. It is truly incomprehensible that the researches of Blondlot and his views upon the secretion of gastric juice have experienced during the past fifty years no completion, no additions, but, on the contrary, have passed out of sight, thanks to the faulty experiments and erroneous representations of later authors. Only in the works of a few writers—and those mostly French—has Blondlot’s theory survived. Of other investigators we must give mention to Heidenhain, who has enriched the physiology of absorption in general, but more especially, in connection with the secretory work of the stomach, has discovered many important facts and has given birth to many fruitful ideas. From him proceed the subdivision of the secretory process according to periods and exciting agencies, as well as the suggestion that it would be important to investigate the individual food-stuffs in relation to the work of the stomach. Heidenhain’s results are contained in his well-known article on the secretion of the cardiac glands of the stomach, published in the year 1879 in Pflüger’s Archives. The work of Blondlot and the additions of Heidenhain comprise almost everything of importance which was accomplished by physiology in fifty years concerning the conditions and mechanism of the secretory work of the stomach during digestion. Full of moment, however, for our subject was the obvious error that mechanical stimulation constituted an effective excitant of the gastric glands, and this error was in its turn a result of faulty methods.”—Horace Fletcher.]